Besides Masur’s eloquent phrasing of the historical significance of this event, and her astute discussion of the legislative origins of D.C. emancipation and provisions of the law ending slavery in Washington, D.C., what I found especially interesting in Masur’s article, is her explanation of the unsuccessful 1849 bill to end slavery in the District of Columbia that Abraham Lincoln had introduced in the House of Representatives during his single term in the U.S. Congress. Kate Masur writes:

Clearly, Washington, D.C., emancipation meant something special to Abraham Lincoln, as it represented the achievement of a legislative goal from when he was a young congressman. While he would rather have had emancipation there take place gradually instead of immediately and with the consent of the District of Columbia’s voters, he signed the Compensated Emancipation Act, as it later came to be known, not only because it contained provisions for the compensation of slaveholders and emigration of freed District slaves, but also because it would once-and-all end the blot of slavery from the nation’s capital.

The second article of interest comes from last Sunday’s Washington Post. Written by Post staff reporter Joe Heim, it is entitled “On Emancipation Day in D.C., Two Memorials Tell Very Different Stories.” In the story, Heim compares two different memorials in Washington, D.C., dealing with African Americans and the Civil War. The first being the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, dedicated in 1876. The second being the African American Civil War Memorial at 1925 Vermont Avenue in the U Street Corridor, dedicated in 1998. Here are pictures of them.

The basic point of Joe Heim’s article is although both memorials commemorate African Americans in the Civil War and in both cases largely were financed by the black community, they have very different messages and reflect the different conditions of African Americans at the time they were built. 1876’s Emancipation Memorial, although paid for with the contributions of former slaves, had its design and construction overseen by an all-white committee and executed by a white sculptor. Heim writes:

So, in other words, the 1876 memorial, built at the end of Reconstruction, reflected a white society that just as soon would forget about slavery, and when they did remember it, wanted to depict themselves as benevolently granting the slaves their freedom–hence a standing President Lincoln reaching out to a kneeling slave. White Americans even then were forgetting the active role played by slaves in their own liberation.

Heim’s also discusses the ambivalent feeling of African Americans in Washington, D.C. about the memorial in Lincoln Park. He writes:

The 1998 memorial, designed and executed by African-American sculptor, Ed Hamilton, well captures the active role played by African Americans in the Civil War, especially the black men that joined the Union Army and Navy. As Heim writes:

In addition to Hamilton’s stirring sculpture, the memorial is surrounded by panels bearing the names of the over 178,000 black men that served in the Union Army. The last touch reflects a late 20th-century tradition, began at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, of acknowledging individually the persons being memorialized even when they were numerous. And nowhere in this memorial is President Lincoln granting freedom to anyone. African Americans clearly are depicted as having earned their freedom, not having it given to them as a gift. The 1998 memorial very much reflects the changed status of African Americans over the 122 years since the first memorial, and changes in the way Americans perceive emancipation over that same period.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com